"Course, to get information, sometimes reporters have to offer some first, and everyone in DC gossips and speculates about politics."
this statement is totally not true and anyone who has ever been a reporter will tell you that.
There are actually several federal laws broken. If you want to narrow it down to one law on "knowlingly outing a covert operative" fine. But even if Libby & Rove skate on that, there are other statutes violated that carry felony indictments.
I sense a trend here; Frist insider trading, no big deal; Tom DeLay, money laundering, no big deal; Rove/Libby, outing a covert operative, no big deal. Cheney aide breches security by emailing classified documents out of the White House, no big deal. Clinton does zip up, impeach his ass.
Was Phame actually "covert"?
It seems not.
http://
justoneminute.typepad.com...overt_was_.html
http://www.factcheck.org/article337.html (and I'd like to tahnks Diuck Cheney for telling me about this site as one with credible information)
She was covert; details in the link above; for those still in denial, here you go:
June 2003 – State Department intelligence officials reportedly prepare a memo on the Niger affair mentioning Wilson ’s trip to Niger and Valerie Wilson’s role in selecting her husband for the mission. The exact date is uncertain. The memo identifies Valerie Wilson but not her status as a covert agent, and it does not use her maiden name Valerie Plame. ******According to one account, the memo was classified and the paragraph containing information about Valerie Wilson was marked with “(S)” to indicate that the information was classified at the “secret” level. The CIA applies this level of classification to the identities of covert officers, according to the Washington Post.***** (“ State Dept. memo gets scrutiny… ,” New York Times, July 16, 2005; “ Probe Centers on Rove, Memo, Phone Calls, ” Bloomberg.com, July 18, 2005; “ Plame’s Identity Marked as Secret, ” Washington Post, July 21, 2005).
To fit the CIA rules for covert, she would have had to been stationed several years overseas, which she wasn't.
It's interesting that all the news about this story come from leaks from the SP's office....
the leaks came from Starr's office in '98 if you will recall.
Starr's office was a model of tight lippedness comparied to the leak factory of the Clinton White House. Starr was also very careful not to publish anything prior to the elections, in stark contracts to an earlier independent counsel who brought up charges right before the 92 election, that were thrown out of court later.
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